A tiny little map of Chicago with streetcar lines and the underlying street grid printed on the obverse of a transfer ticket. It seems to be mainly used for indicating the time and place that the transfer was issued, rather than for any attempt at navigation of the system. If I’m reading the clock face at the top of the ticket correctly, this transfer was issued at 3:35 (or 7:15) on July 2nd by a […]
Portland’s MAX light rail system as it appeared just after the initial opening of the Red Line. Note that the Red Line doesn’t continue out to Beaverton as it does these days, but turns around just west of downtown. Later, the Yellow Line would turn around here as well, before it was rerouted down the transit mall. The map itself does a nice job with a relatively simple system. The gracefully curved Willamette River is […]
Cutaway diagram, map, and accompanying text describing the construction of an electric motor-powered rapid transit subway that would have run through the basements of “fire-proofed buildings constructed along the line”. Despite shallow excavations of only nine-and-a-half feet, the blurb promises “no perceptible vibrations from the passage of trains”. Hmmm. nyplmaps: The City Railway Company, rapid transit passenger lines [189-?] This map shows the location of a proposed underground rapid transit line and an “alternative line” in […]
Not a true map, but what the Railway Clearing House (RCH) called a “Railway Junction Diagram”. Note that while railway lines, stations and junctions are faithfully and accurately depicted, not a single other detail is shown. That’s because these diagrams were created to assist the RCH in its primary task – the equitable apportionment of fares and receipts when trains from one railway company used the track of another. Obviously, if a train from one […]
Delightful three-dimensional representation of daily passenger numbers on Frankfurt’s streetcar lines in the early 20th century. Each strip of wood represents 4,000 passengers: the higher the wood, the more passengers on that section of line! The figure is from Willard C. Brinton’s Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts, first published in 1914 and widely regarded as the first book on data visualization best practices. You can read the book on archive.org Source: 100yrsofbrinton
When is a bus map not a bus map? When it doesn’t really show any routes at all, that’s when. While this cheerfully cartoonish map might show destinations and label some major roads with bus route numbers, I think that anyone – let alone tourists new to LA! – would find it very difficult to actually navigate their way anywhere using only this map. It just about works as an introduction to the region and […]
Taken at the London Transport Museum’s Acton Depot. I absolutely love how the newer additions to the map have been literally riveted onto the old map – no stickers here! The presence of both British Rail symbols and an early Docklands Light Rail logo seems to place the final iteration of this map somewhere in the period from 1991 (when the Bank DLR station opened) and 1997 (when BR was totally privatised), although I suspect […]
Via: ddotdc: A picture map of the Washington Metropolitan Region, created for the official bicentennial celebration of the American Revolution (1776-1976). Dated 1975. Please view a full, high-resolution version of the map. Image 2: This section of the map gives an overview of the District, as well as listing information about different Metrobus stops and the in-progress Metrorail (which opened in March 1976, just before the bicentennial). Image 3: The map gives an up-close look at different […]
Great photos of this fantastic old map, discovered in place (presumably during the Bakerloo/Northern Line station refurbishment works) and now protected in situ by some rather ugly chicken wire. Note that the loop at the western end of the Piccadilly Line to Heathrow Terminal 4 is still under construction, which had been completed by the time this version of the map (May 2013, 3 stars) came out in 1988. Source: jaggers/Flickr – links no longer […]
From the days before the current colour-coding of the lines and the now-iconic black background. Here, we have dark blue (or black: it’s hard to tell from this picture) instead of green for Line 1, and red instead of orange for Line 2. Line 4 retains its yellow color, and the three colours combined also form part of the Metro’s branding at the base of the map. The map itself is fairly blocky and primitive, […]
